In terms of both its nature and timing, the European Union President Ursula von der Leyen’s visit to India last week was a pivotal moment for bilateral relations as well as the larger dynamic among the world’s major powers. Well before the disruption of the global order was begun by the election of Donald Trump as US president for the second time, von der Leyen had decided to put India at the top of destinations outside Europe in her own second term that began last summer. Having decided to give relations with Delhi a high priority, von der Leyen arrived in India with 22 of her 27 cabinet colleagues (or the College of Commissioners) for an intense, and broad-based round of consultations between the two governments at the highest level. The return of Trump to the White House and the crisis in trans-Atlantic relations marked by the US outreach to Russia at the expense of Ukraine and Europe provided an unprecedented geopolitical context for the rebooting of ties between India and Europe.
India was among the first countries to establish diplomatic ties with the Brussels-headquartered European Economic Community (the EU’s predecessor) back in 1963. But the relations between the two never took off. As India drifted close to the Soviet Union during the Cold War and turned inwards economically, there was little room for productive engagement between Delhi and Brussels. The early 1990s that saw the collapse of the Soviet Union and India’s own economic reforms offered a more hopeful setting for the partnership between India and the more ambitious European Union that replaced the EEC. Delhi and Brussels unveiled a strategic partnership in 2004 and launched free trade talks in 2007. Although trade and economic cooperation expanded, a free trade treaty remained elusive and the talks were broken off in 2013 by the EU, and the strategic partnership remained only in name. The NDA government sought to revive political and economic partnership with the EU and renewed trade talks in 2022.
